Welcome Dawson, new HUH Research Fellow!

We were pleased to welcome Dr. Dawson White to the Herbaria earlier this month as our newest HUH Research Fellow!

Dawson received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2019 and recently completed an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Field Museum.

During his time with us as an HUH Research Fellow, Dawson plans to continue his research program investigating the diversity, domestication, and evolution of the coca crops (Erythroxylum spp.) of South America and the utility of leaf spectral reflectance of herbarium tissues for taxonomic classification. The coca domestication project targets outstanding questions from work presented in Systematic Biology in 2021, such as whether there were two or three independent origins of domestication and where and when these events occurred. This second generation of analyses will utilize whole genomes of several hundred samples gathered from the field and herbarium representing new and important taxa and geographic regions for phylogeographic inference.

Dawson will be scanning many hundreds of samples in the Harvard University Herbaria representing the Coca family and several other clades to investigate how well we can use visual to shortwave infrared spectral reflectance profiles (400-2,500 nm wavelengths) to classify leaf tissues to species or other taxonomic levels. This project will evaluate how phenomic data can be effectively collected from herbarium specimens via reflectance spectroscopy, opening the door to phenotypic trait data collection at the large geographic and temporal scales supplied by herbarium collections.